Combining what we’ve learned
Accessibility
It’s important to take accessibility into consideration when creating a piece of media so that all the material is equally easy to take in regardless of any disabilities or difficulties. Regardless of whether providing such accommodations requires extra work, it is important that there is not a divide between people who can take in the information and those who can’t. For this website, I used alternate text for images to help those with visual disabilities understand the significance of each picture without having to see exactly what’s happening in the picture. I also did the best I could to use contrasting colors to make text more easily viewed, although all of my pictures were from before color photography and therefore do not contrast well. Thirdly, I used different headers to denote different section of the text so that those with screen-readers could easily orient themselves in the text and skip to where they want to read from; I even tried using headers when including the times on the transcript, so that if someone wanted to skip ahead to minute 3, they would be able to. Lastly, I included a transcript, as mentioned before, with times included, so that those who have auditory disabilities would be able to take in my content as well as a hearing person would.
Media/source credit
When using media from outside sources, it is important to credit the creators appropriately for their work for multiple reasons; firstly, because in doing so you protect yourself from potential lawsuits cause by “stealing” the media without credit, and secondly, because as someone else’s intellectual property, it’s the right thing to do. For my project, I sourced all the music used from Mixkit, all my information from the following websites: Biography.com, History.com, Encyclopedia Britannica, and All That’s Interesting, and my pictures from the following: Wikimedia Commons, which is a website that makes public domain content available, and Wikipedia . Every piece of media I used is sourced and linked on the post for the episode it’s used in, with as much credit given as I was able to find.
Information accuracy
Misinformation has great power in terms of swaying people’s beliefs and feelings about a subject, which is why it is so important to ensure accuracy when sharing information. Although intentional misinformation, such as clickbait or ragebait, to gather more viewers is a common practice on the internet (which, interestingly enough, is related to some of the material I talk about in episode 2), I have done my best to remain as accurate as possible to history so as to provide the best portrayal I can.
Copyright
I chose to copyright my website as CC BY-NC 4.0, which breaks down as follows: CC indicating that my work falls under a Creative Commons license, BY indicating that those who use my work must attribute it to me, and NC indicating that it may only be used for non-commercial purposes. I chose to use this license because it doesn’t bother me that others may use my work or remix it to make their own works; the only important things to me are that a) I get credited for any work they use that I created, and b) they don’t make money off of work that I made for free. As such, this copyright designation works perfectly for my purposes.
AI
I used Microsoft Copilot to create an outline for each script, then did research to fill in the information for each topic it gave me. I also used AI to brainstorm ideas for the podcast name before deciding on “The Dark and the Dangerous”.
The project
Process
I started by deciding on a name for my podcast and creating the website using WordPress. I then used Microsoft Copilot to create an outline for each episode, and did research on each killer to flesh out the outline. I recorded using the same equipment I used for the last audio project, the Voice Memos application on my iPhone 12 Pro. After recording, I entered the audio into Soundtrap to edit and add music, which I got from Mixkit. After editing, I was able to create a post for each episode and embed the audio file. I then used Canva to create a favicon and header image for the website. After entering the images, I went back and personalized the website more, adding different pages and features and getting rid of any that didn’t have anything to do with the podcast. I tried to change the image behind the title of each page, but I could’t find where I was able to do that. I even went into the code of the website and tried to change it there, but although it would change while I remained on the page, the second I left it would revert back to the original and was unable to save. However, I changed everything else that I could.
Link
Here’s the link to my project: The Dark and the Dangerous.
